Tens of Millions of Yemeni Lives Are in the Balance

Amal Hussein, the seven-year-old emaciated Yemeni girl
whose harrowing portrait drew
the world’s attention to the largely overlooked humanitarian catastrophe
unfolding in Yemen, died from acute
malnutrition on November 1 in a camp for the internally displaced.

In her displacement, her illness, her hunger, and her
tragic death, Amal embodies the perpetual suffering of Yemenis through a
vicious conflict now entering its fourth year. Out of that conflict – in which
civilians are regularly targeted, humanitarian aid strategically blocked,
health care facilities attacked, and starvation deployed as a weapon – has
grown the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Today, 22 million Yemenis (75 percent of the total population)
are in desperate need of humanitarian aid; 8.4 million do not know where their next meal will come from; and
400,000 children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition – the condition
that took Amal’s life.

Yemen is effectively on the brink of a massive famine.
Its economy is crumbling. Its infrastructure is in tatters. Its health care
system has all but collapsed. This state of affairs is not an arbitrary
consequence of war. It is the direct result of how the conflict has been
prosecuted by warring parties: with utter disregard for international rules and
norms. In fact, the parties to the conflict in Yemen – particularly the
Saudi-UAE coalition – have waged their war with a practical cruelty that seems
designed to obliterate Yemenis’ capacity to survive.

Eleven people were killed and more than 19 wounded in an airstrike on this hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders in Abs, Yemen, in August 2016. Photo: Getty Images

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has been documenting
one facet of this brutal logic of war: the targeting of health care facilities
or the failure to take appropriate measures to shield them from attacks. Over
the past year, PHR has independently confirmed more than 23 individual attacks on health facilities. Hospitals and
clinics have been bombarded, shelled, overrun, and put out of service. A recent
attack by the Saudi-led coalition destroyed a clearly demarcated Doctors
without Borders clinic in Abs on June 11. More recently, on October 11, a hospital in ad-Durayhimi reportedly sustained heavy
damage from airstrikes.

Days before her death, Amal was discharged from the hospital
where she was receiving treatment to make room for other patients. It is
devastatingly telling that a child dying from starvation should be sent home by
a health care system that has been rendered utterly powerless in tending to her
needs. Amal’s death encapsulates the tragedy that has become Yemen today. It
also a harbinger of the fate that will befall the Yemeni people should the
current opportunity to shift the course of the conflict be squandered.

We in the human rights community and beyond must keep
pushing to bring this grinding conflict to an end. However, so long as it
endures, the priority should be on the immediate halt of attacks on civilians and
civilian infrastructure by all parties to the conflict. We should maintain the
pressure on countries that have so far supported the Saudi-UAE coalition with
arms, intelligence, and logistics – including the United States. These members
of the international community must assume their share of the responsibility
for the crisis – something that is already materializing within U.S. policymaking circles –
and work on ensuring the compliance of all parties to the conflict with
international humanitarian law. We need to keep supporting independent
investigations of violations of international humanitarian law in pursuit of
accountability for the egregious crimes that have been committed against
civilians over the course of the conflict. Lastly, we must sustain our
collective call for the unhindered entry and provision of humanitarian aid. It
is high time the world begins treating this crisis with the gravity it has
required for so long.

Top photo: A nurse tends to a two-year-old boy suffering from malnutrition in Abs, Yemen in September, 2018. Photo: Getty Images.